Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

HUNCHED OVER HIS work table, Erasmus read those columns with his stomach lurching and heaving. Trump this, he could almost hear Zeke saying. You collected bones and twigs, and then lost them; you and your friend. I've brought back people. Not skulls, not brains in ajar: living, breathing people.

He read through the columns again. Which parts of Zeke’s account were true, and which were not? He’d glimpsed Zeke’s notebook a few times, when Zeke was pointing out things to Lavinia; the pages were clean, no more tattered than when Erasmus had last seen the notebook in the box. No grease stains, watermarks, drops of blood or food or filth. Perhaps he’d written it all in the spring, during his journey to Upernavik. Perhaps he’d written it all on the ship that carried him home. Or perhaps only the entries regarding his journey on foot were faked, and the others were true.

He longed to ask Annie and Tom about their time with Zeke. A few times, when Zeke was off giving interviews or had gone home to sleep, Erasmus had approached the Esquimaux. Each time Lavinia had hovered. “You mustn’t tire them,” she’d said. Not leaving him alone with them for a single minute; equally unwilling to spend a minute alone with him herself.

From the Repository he watched strangers moving in his house.

His eyes were sore, his head ached, something hurt at the base of his ribs; he drank brandy, hoping for comfort and warmth, but it only made him dizzy. He hid for the next few days, unable to eat or sleep. He could not remember ever feeling so sick, he was sure he had a fever. A figure appeared on the flagstones, crossed the garden, opened the Repository door: Zeke. He came ostensibly to ask if Erasmus felt all right but then said, in a calm dry voice, that Erasmus was upsetting his sister. “It makes her unhappy to have you around,” he said. “Especially when you behave like this.”

Erasmus touched a glass of water to his parched lips. “I can’t talk,” he said. “I’m sick.”

When Zeke left, he slipped from his chair and lay under the table. It was true that Lavinia shrank from his gaze; he’d come upon her and Zeke embracing in the solarium, holding hands in the garden, pressed against each other’s shoulders. Always she looked happy until, catching sight of him, her lips would tighten and the color rise in her cheeks. Zeke, he thought, must have told her stories. Stories so ugly that she no longer trusted her own brother and could not enjoy her new happiness in his presence.

He wrapped his head in pillowcases wrung out in cold water — where had he gotten this fever? Finally, when he felt better, he dressed in clean clothes and joined the others for dinner. Candles, flowers, Alexandra quiet at one end of the table and Lavinia glowing at the other; Copernicus and Zeke between them. He sat, after a murmured apology, and confronted a platter of sauteed calf liver: the food he hated most in the world, as Lavinia had always known. Not once had she ever served it to him. The slabs gleamed at him, sending out an evil smell. Why wouldn’t Zeke stay at his parents’ house, where he belonged? His Esquimaux were still upstairs; he rested his arm on Lavinia’s chair; his papers were scattered everywhere. He ate the liver greedily, once more asking after Erasmus’s health.

Erasmus pushed away from the table, trembling and queasy.

When he stood, the surface of the table dipped and swam, shimmered and danced, the glasses waltzing with the spoons. Chasing the meteorite that had been the instrument of Zeke’s salvation, he’d dropped through a hole in the ice just the size of this table. In the moment before he lost consciousness he’d opened his eyes and seen murres racing and darting around him, swift as fish, amazingly graceful. They were clumsy in the air but flew like angels through the water, and suddenly he’d seen why they were built as they were: the water was their natural home, as with walruses or whales. Now he saw that he’d misjudged Zeke in the same way. This house was the home Zeke had always craved; he’d slipped into it the minute Erasmus lost his place.

“Lavinia,” Erasmus said. She glanced up at him, her eyes glazed with that translucent film. He cleared his throat and steadied his walking sticks beneath him. All he’d ever wanted for her was that she have the chance to live with the person she loved, as he had not. And if he couldn’t bear the way she became around Zeke… “Would you excuse me?” he said.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK he made arrangements to move out of the Repository until Lavinia and Zeke were married and settled into a home of their own. “I know it’s my house,” he told Copernicus, who tried to talk him out of his decision. “I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m angry all the time and I can’t stand to be around Zeke like this, and I’m sick and I don’t want to fight with Lavinia…”

“One meal,” Copernicus said gently. “She ordered it because Zeke likes liver. So do I, for that matter.”

Erasmus held out the folds of cloth hanging from his belt. “It’s weeks,” he said. “I didn’t want to worry you. But I can’t keep anything down.”

Alexandra was equally bewildered. “ I have to move,” she said.

“Of course I do, Lavinia doesn’t need me anymore. But you don’t have to.”

“I can’t think,” he said. “I can’t work, I can’t sleep, I can’t eat.” She frowned but helped him pack a few things. Erasmus moved slowly, deliberately, hoping that Lavinia might walk in and interrupt him. Might rest her hand on his and say, “Where are you going? Why don’t you stay?”

She hid in her room, saying nothing. He hesitated near her door, wanting to knock, afraid to knock. Then, almost as an afterthought, he stopped at the room farther down the hall to take his leave of Zeke’s Esquimaux. He’d seen little of them; Zeke prepared their meals, which they ate here. Zeke took them for walks each day, and at night, when he returned to his parents’ house, he locked them in their room and asked Copernicus— Copernicus, Erasmus thought, not me— to check on them.

Their room looked like the inside of a summer tent; skins were hung on the walls and spread on the floor. Annie was crouched in front of the window with Tom in her lap, a plate of boiled chicken, barely touched, on the floor beside her. “Where is Tseke?” she asked. “When does he return?”

“With his parents,” Erasmus said. Though he knew that was just for the afternoon. “He’ll be back soon.” He had no idea if Annie understood Zeke’s relationship to Lavinia, or the oddness of his own position.

“I’m going away for a while,” he said. What difference could this make to her? “I wanted to say goodbye to you and your son.” Just as he was thinking he could never know anything about her, a dusty tan moth emerged from the fur near her knee.

“Goodbye,” she echoed. She caught the moth with an absent-minded gesture. As he watched she opened a crack in her fist, peered at the fluttering creature, and then released it. Exactly as he would have done. Why shouldn’t they talk?

“Why did you come here?” he asked. “Did Zeke force you?”

“It was necessary,” she explained. Her eyes followed the moth’s path: window, ceiling, window, closet, window, window, window. “He says, ‘I am a kind of angekok — did I not bring you the iron, the bears, the narwhals? Did not all the children stay well while I am with you? But I need you to come home with me and meet my people, so they will understand where I have been.’ “

Her voice, repeating this, mimicked the pitch and rhythm of Zeke’s in an uncanny way. The moth bounced against a row of books: pfft, pfft, pfft. Then soared up to the ceiling and into the window again. “He must bring me home to meet his people or my tribe will suffer. He said your ship had a spirit also, and was angry at being left behind in the ice. I must come here to where the ship is born, so the spirit does not punish my people. He says it is the same as with the spirit of the saviffsue he disturbed.”